Clearly Facebook is afraid to compete on the merits of its services. Isn't that the message whenever any sort of vendorlock is implemented?

I never before took Google's social network very seriously. Now that Facebook is showing fear of them, and acting so childish about it, I'm willing to reconsider that. To anyone with some sense, Facebook is providing a more stunning endorsement of Google's services than Google itself could have ever created.

If Google+ is to succeed, they need to stop with the invite-only nonsense. A social network is only as strong as its user-base, and Google+ remains questionable until it has enough people on it to make it worthwhile.

Except that you can test an email platform with a limited amount of users, because those users can still email others outside of your platform, due to the way email works.

I've had a google+ profile for almost a week, and I haven't bothered logging in after the first day, because none of my friends are on it and I can't invite them either. It's a social network that doesn't allow you to network with your social circle.

When I mentioned that I had a google+ account, at least a dozen of my friends asked me to invite them, and I couldn't. They'll probably lose interest waiting for an invite, just as I've lost interest waiting to have more friends to interact with.

How exactly am I supposed to help them test their platform if I can't use it?

On the other hand, I love Google+, because a lot of friends are on it that never were on Facebook. And most of my favourite and more active Facebook contacts have also migrated already. So for me, it's a big win already.

It started with less annoying people than myspace (being university only), then opened to the public, but the fact that social network whores were already invested in myspace slowed the pace of facebook becoming annoying.

What do I know though, I thought buzz was alright, and it's automatic stuff was painfully clear and explained to me.

Hopefully the "circle" concept will make it easier to make it so you don't have to hear social network spam from your friends with no lives. I don't have a g+ account, and I'm not particularly interested in signing up but it does seem like it could make some headway wrt what you're talking about.

That's what happened for me with Wave. Eventually I got my wife on it and we used it to plan some travel, but none of my other friends really used it. (Of course, the bigger problem with Wave was nobody really knew what to use it for, even once it opened and they had people to use it with.)

Plus has worked out much better for my social network, though: one of my friends got an invite and the majority of our network got added in the ~12 hour period that invites were open. One of our friends remarked that w

Once you post that, they'll all get an email telling them about google+. google are leaving the signup door open for hours on and hours off each day, it seems, so tell them to keep trying - I do it in the status update.

Can you imagine inviting your friends to a bar saying - it remains open for many hours on & many hours off each day. Keep coming there & checking it out again & again to see if it's open.

Facebook was effectively invite only for a while until anyone over 13 could join up and that only seemed to increase the excitement. You want to be a part of what you can't have.

If I was Facebook I would be worried. Zuckerberg merely came up with a few chance ideas that made social networks......social. Relationship status and all that. Apart from that it's merely a fairly clean looking, unspectacular PHP application. Facebook's lead as the premier social networking site is everything. If they have to start competing on technology then the future doesn't look bright.

Facebook started out by being only available to students attending a few select schools, but I don't think that is "effectively invite only." The difference is that when one is a full-time student at a university, the vast majority of your friends and acquaintances are also students at that university. It wasn't open to the public, but for those it was open to, it was also open to a great many of the people they would want to interact with.

With Google+ the sample of people you could network with is essentially random. I would like to try it, but I haven't scored an invite, and even if I did -- I only know one other person who has been able to try it.

There's a big difference between email and social networking (at least as currently implemented). Email is naturally federated. I run my own mail server, and only three people have accounts on it, but we can still exchange emails with anyone else that we want to. If I run a social networking server with three users... that's just a bit sad. Unless, of course, it's running some open protocol that has established servers (Diaspora, OpenSocial, OneSocialWeb, and so on). Unfortunately, none of these protoc

Meh. You're right, of course, but I don't think the strategy will hurt Google with +. MMO's do ultra-limited releases to special beta testers too, and they do just fine. I think they'll build enough buzz and then do a wide release, and I think that once they release it they'll have their biggest marketing advantage still intact- - people are pissed at FB for all the privacy BS they pull, and would love to ditch it.

I don't know about that. Facebook owes I think much of its early success to its at the time exclusivity. First it was just Harvard, then it was Harvard and some other top teir schools. People joined because it was people they already knew personally and trusted or people that had already been vetted by the administrations board of an institution they have some degree of trust in, who they would be encountering as other users of the service.

Manufactured scarcity is one of the many marketing tactics used to increase demand. It's used in everything from cellphones and Nintendos to even Facebook, which started out as an "exclusive" service to members of certain colleges.

I've found that you can invite anyone in simply by manually adding their email address to a Google+ post you make. Everyone that I have "Added" in such a way has received an email that allowed them to create an account.

If Google+ is to succeed, they need to stop with the invite-only nonsense. A social network is only as strong as its user-base, and Google+ remains questionable until it has enough people on it to make it worthwhile.

I disagree. By limiting the access to the service, it makes it a scarce resource and people who wouldn't be interested in it are now dying to get in because they have been told they can't. Besides, if even I can get an invite in, anyone who knows anyone can probably find a way in.

I second that. Also the clever marketing ploy where google plus tells me they've got no further capacity right now... Check back later....

The reason they are doing this is because of previous problems with letting everyone in at the beginning. They messed things up with Buzz when they did that. I think it is a good idea so that a lot of the kinks and small annoyances get worked out.

The reason they are doing this is because of previous problems with letting everyone in at the beginning. They messed things up with Buzz when they did that. I think it is a good idea so that a lot of the kinks and small annoyances get worked out.

The problem with Buzz was that everyone was immediately integrated in to Buzz which exposed some aspects of one's other Google service accounts that wasn't otherwise previously available to others.

Not only that, but I think the exclusivity causes people to covet it until they start to wet themselves with anticipation. Once they finally get access they'll feel like they've just crossed something off their bucket list.

When I saw the announcement at Engadget and saw how many people were foaming at the mouth while freely tossing out their email addresses into the open for a scrap, I lost a little bit of my faith in humanity.

It all wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Facebook built up it's userbase around taking information from things like MSN, your e-mail contacts and so forth.

Worse, I've had a Facebook recommendation from Facebook for someone I've only ever spoken to via MSN and have no real life friend connections, and both of us are tech savvy such that neither of us let Facebook import friends from Outlook, MSN etc. and we both live at opposite ends of the country and have never met IRL so I'm still to this day a little perplexed as to how the hell Facebook made that link. It kind of implies that Facebook has had access to MSN data even when explicit permission wasn't given.

In this respect it's sheer hypocrisy, I mean what the hell is wrong with them? It's fine for them to build their business off the back of others, but not for someone else to do the same with them?

Facebook is really annoying because my friends are well my friends. My pictures and so on.Twitter is and Google I hope will fix this. Twitter is just an odd thing. How do they make money without destroying Twitter? Also I am shocked how few people use Twitter and yet at the same time how important it has become.

No they don't. Facebook just has a sublicenseable, transferable, license to them that they can sell to any interested parties. You still nominally own them. For extra fun, if you upload any pictures to Facebook that you don't own the copyright for, you just indemnified Facebook if they are sued for selling them when they don't actually have a valid license to do so.

I'd like to believe a reasonable percentage of those people use fake or unhelpful-to-Facebook information. For example, my political views are listed as "yes" and my religion is listed as "Pastafarian".

That might not matter quite as much as you think. Do you only have nonsense conversations with your contacts on Facebook? Do people only post nonsense messages on your "wall?" Do you only click on random links? Facebook collects a lot more information than what you overtly give them.

I'm not sure what Facebook considers helpful, but from a statistical perspective a semi-unique joke-response probably reveals more than an ubiquitous sincere response. Take two people who list Christian on their profile, and take two people who list Pastafarian (you aren't the only one). I suspect that the latter pair has more in common than the former pair.

In my experience, most of these people just didn't read the ToS. When people ask me why I'm not on Facebook, I quote a few of the rights that you grant to Facebook for anything that you upload. The universal reaction has been shock, usually followed by 'is that legal?'.

Why does this SHITE always get posted?For a dating site, would you say the women are the product, and the men are the customers?No, they are both customers, just not equal due to the pricing structure.

Facebook is structured like any agency, with two products, facing two different sets of customers.

I agree that you're a user receiving a service. A customer pays for goods and services, when's the last time you paid Facebook? You might be a customer of whoever produces Farmville or any number of other apps but that still doesn't make you a customer of Facebook. Saying you're a customer of Facebook because you use it and contribute to it is tantamount to me saying I'm a customer of Wikipedia.

I see a reason to avoid both empires.Yes, despite common belief, you can have an active online life without Facebook and Google.

(I switched my search provider from Google last week. After the latest "improvements", almost all search results I get are from Chinese wholesale companies and Indian ad-sponsored keyword re-bloggers, of which there appears to be millions. I.e. Google has become far less useful.)

Stop searching for Indian Viagra, then. Facebook and LinkedIn are convenient ways to keep track of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Of course, it's possible to do it without Facebook, but it's much more complicated to do so.

When does the antitrust trial begin? It's like Microsoft all over again. Facebook abuses its dominant position on the internet (facebook forms in almost every "web 2.0" website, just like IE was "so tightly integrated in windows that it couldn't be removed"). And now they're also trying to destroy competition by blocking them.

In comparison, with IE you can at least download another browser. Facebook won't help you in your transition (or let you delete your stuff from their servers).

Sure. And for including that stupid +1 button (which you can't remove) in every search result, and not a "Like in Facebook" button. Isn't that kinda like including IE in Windows (which you can't remove), and not Firefox?

Don't be stupid, at the time when Netscape went out of business, IE *was* a better browser. Netscape was just butthurt because of IE, and if you have some memory, you will remember that it happened in the middle of the dotcom bubble, and ended with the bubble bursting. It took away many comp

Yes. This is Slashdot. Their motto is: HATE Microsoft, support Linux, use Apple. And deny that Google and Facebook are sleeping with the government. Because Facebook helps antisocial nerds, and Google swears they "do no evil".

I use Firefox and Chrome, yet I cannot uninstall IE from the machine. That's product tying. It's a waste of disk space, and worse, it means that even though I have installed a more secure browser, some stupid program is going to be able to load up IE anyway, and get hit by all the security holes in it. To avoid that, I have to waste my internet connection downloading updates for a browser I don't want in the first place.

Uh huh. Waste of disk space. Never mind that the smallest drive you can get is like 500G

No, I'm not an idiot, thanks for asking, mr AC.Microsoft got sued because they included a Web browser. Just like Apple does, and some butthurt competition decided that was bad, and sued them. Really stupid to me. But it seems that's the law. So I wonder, why no one is suing Apple for including their own browser AND bundling it with Windows iTunes (installing it without your permission). The same with QuickTime - which I don't want or need.

Last time I checked, Microsoft doesn't. They don't have a 100% market ownership. iTunes, on the other hand, does have a SIGNIFICANT market share. Isn't that kinda like a monopoly? It was for microsoft.

Also what's with Apple's license? Why can't I buy OS X and legally install it in any PC? They have monopoly in what computers you can install OS X to. Why do I have to be forced to buy Apple to use OS X?

Really? My data is all there. They didn't steal anything from me. I can open Office documents just fine with StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice.Also, microsoft didn't FORCE me to anything. They can't FORCE me to use Office, because there is no MS Thug behind me bullying me to use Office.

And... what the fuck is the problem with proprietary formats? If they want to use them, so be it. All of sudden every format every tool writes to MUST be open and readily available for anyone? What the fuck is wrong with you

They sell ads, but the users of sites don't pay the sites directly. The sites get paid by advertisers, so advertisers are the customers and site users are the product that is sold by the site to the advertiser. Do ads work? Of-course they do somewhat, just like spam works somewhat, even if 1% of people buy something because of the ads, then I guess it's worth it, maybe?

The convincing argument for the opposite is that I don't have a user account on one of those sites, and on/. I turned the ads off and I b

Facebook count on the social network being 'sticky' enough to retain their users and make it hard to move. Obviously, with competitors which don't suck, they need to play dirty.

I was keen to see if their backup feature exported email addresses. Sure enough, it doesn't. So there goes my idea of writing a script to extract my contacts out of Facebook backups suitable for import into Google+.

About the only way this state of affairs will change, is if the bad publicity gets bad enough for Facebook to be shamed into doing the right thing.

Smart move by Facebook -- pissing off their hardcore techie users. Very classy.

Yes, I do. Just because some group may have (and your assertion is highly questionable due to the high usage of Netscape among non-techies before Firefox even came out) helped push the adoption of one piece of software in no way hold any sway over the adoption of some other product or service.

Seriously, non-techies can often be heavily influenced by what their techie friends tell them, since they realize they don't know computers and techies do. Hence, techies can have a disproportionate influence on adoption.

Great, now prove that the huge userbase of Facebook had anything at all to do with hardcore techies.

Just sign into yahoo using your facebook account and it will even create a throw away yahoo acount for you and import all of your facebook friends as contacts. Then just export those contacts into a vcf and import them into a contact group in gmail. (Or import them directly into G+).

They blocked Facebook from accessing GMail contacts directly because Facebook wouldn't allow them to import Facebook contacts directly. You can still download your entire GMail contacts list yourself in a multitude of formats and do whatever you like with them, including importing them into Facebook if you really want to, whereas this news article is about Facebook blocking their own users from doing the same kind of mass-export.

I hope the existence of this closed gardens are a temporal phenomenom on the internet. We will learn as much as possible about how people want to interact on the internet (because everything is possible), then we could implement that as a open protocol, so it avoid all the problem of closed gardens.

reader dkd903 points out that Google has been busy removing Twitter from real time search, due to a contract expiry with Twitter.

Has anyone out there in/. land ever google'd for something and found the answer in a twitter post? Has anyone on/. ever seen a twitter post containing something that could theoretically be something someone would search for?

I imagine its about as common as searching for airline tickets and finding a UFO.

It's not regular search, it's "realtime search". You choose a topic and see a stream of news and social network posts regarding the topic. I've used it in the past to follow sporting or big news events to see what people were saying about it.

Yes, I discovered realtime search was gone when I tried to share a Twitter conversation with a friend who wants a musical instrument.

Separately, a friend was engaged in an urban treasure hunt, in a different state, I was able to tell her where a person her team needed to find was, since he shared it an hour before entirely separately.

Let's see, I've used it to learn about one-day sales/promotions, I've used it to learn about status of servers (the first place "Is such-and-such up?" seems to get asked is Twi

This kinda proves that Google is not really a "search engine" per se, as if we needed any verification of that..

The hell? Are you reading the same article as the rest of us?

I guess we all have to send out our own crawlers to actually find anything outside the advertising realm. It's not that I mind seeing Twitter or similar removed, but I always wonder about the truly valuable stuff that's not being indexed because there's no ad link or contract involved.

This has nothing to do with advertising, and little to do with indexing. In order for the "real-time search" to be viable, Google needs Twitter to send them a constant stream of all tweets. Twitter has decided to stop doing so, ergo Google can no longer provide the "real-time search" functionality for twitter. They can, and do, continue to provide indexing of tweets - it's just that they now index them the same way they index the vast majority